Contentions

Michael Hirsch is no hard-line hawk. A longtime editor at Newsweek who is now chief correspondent at National Journal, he espouses the views you might expect of a paid-up member of the East Coast media elite. So it is worth paying attention when he takes a stand so at odds with the conventional wisdom about the NSA, which claims that the spy agency is engaged in a dangerous and unproductive violation of civil liberties.

To the contrary, Hirsch argues in National Journal that the NSA’s far-flung surveillance is necessary to deal with the changing threat from al-Qaeda, which is morphing from mega-attacks like 9/11 to encouraging more “lone wolf” attacks such as those at Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon. He notes that Abu Musab al-Suri, a student of classic insurgent theory (I write about him a little in my history of guerrilla warfare, Invisible Armies), has emerged after Osama bin Laden’s death as an increasingly influential jihadist leader, and he has favored lower-level attacks all along.

Hirsch writes that the NSA’s opponents:

may not realize that the practice they most hope to stop—its seemingly indiscriminate scouring of phone data and emails—is precisely what intelligence officials say they need to detect the kinds of plots al-Suri favors. For the foreseeable future, al-Suri’s approach will mean more terrorist attacks against more targets—albeit with a much lower level of organization and competence. “It’s harder to track. Future attacks against the homeland will be less sophisticated and less lethal, but there’s just going to be more of them,” says Michael Hayden, the former NSA director who steered the agency after 9/11 toward deep dives into Internet and telephonic data. Adds Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, “I think al-Qaida’s capabilities for a strike into the United States are more dangerous and more numerous than before 9/11.” For better or worse, the only hope to track them all is an exceptionally deep, organized, and free-ranging intelligence apparatus, experts say.

Hirsch’s entire article is well worth reading and pondering. It may shake the anti-NSA bias that seems to be creeping into our public discourse.